News

Since the 1960s, India’s groundwater irrigation has increased dramatically, playing an important role in its economy and people’s lives — supporting livelihoods of over 26 crore farmers and agricultural labourers who grow over a third of India’s foodgrains.

Stanford researchers have determined that more than 15 million children are living in high-mortality hotspots across 28 Sub-Saharan African countries, where death rates remain stubbornly high despite progress elsewhere within those countries.

It is now the end of summer for what has been a milestone year for my wife and me. This essay, itself a mini-milestone, is the fifth annual report from our farm. As readers of prior Almanac postings will know, my day job is as professor of international agricultural policy at Stanford University; however, we also own a medium-sized farm in east central Iowa that produces corn, soybeans, alfalfa and beef from a cow-calf herd.

One of the biggest challenges in providing relief to people living in poverty is locating them. The availability of accurate and reliable information on the location of impoverished zones is surprisingly lacking for much of the world, particularly on the African continent. Aid groups and other international organizations often fill in the gaps with door-to-door surveys, but these can be expensive and time-consuming to conduct.